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How I Used Flexpa to Recover Over $2,000 in Medical Billing Errors

When my dad fell ill with a mysterious respiratory disease back in 2022, my family faced two challenges: understanding his mysterious symptoms and navigating healthcare’s revenue cycle madness and complicated medical bills. While the doctors eventually diagnosed him with valley fever (we originally feared he had lung cancer), one thing we didn’t know was that the billing saga would take over a year to resolve.

The Billing Nightmare Begins

My parents had recently switched to a High-Deductible Health Plan through Kaiser Permanente and were quickly ramping up to hit their deductible from all the specialist visits, MRIs, PET scans, and biopsies. As the bills flooded in, my parents did what many folks do — pay now and try to figure it out later.

When they finally asked me to help them understand the HDHP setup and review all of their expenses, something didn't add up. Copays were different than what their SBC (Summary of Benefits and Coverage) docs outlined. Billing statements didn't match their payment history and contained a ton of confusing line items.

The Power of EOBs (Explanation of Benefits)

Having worked at Flexpa for just over a year now, I knew that the EOBs could be considered the most reliable source of truth. We had just shipped our internal demo application (launched publicly as MyFlexpa last November) that lets patients access their health insurance data, via our user validation program, so I had a quick and easy way to log into my father's Kaiser account and review all of his EOBs.

These often-overlooked documents that collect dust in a family mail pile are the “official receipts” from your health plan. They show exactly what was billed, what insurance paid to your providers, and what you’re actually liable for—the amount you should have paid out-of-pocket at the end of the day.

His EOBs showed:

1. Lower copay amounts than what was being charged in-office
2. Coinsurance discrepancies that varied quite a bit from those listed on the provider statements
3. No record of claim submission for certain "uncovered services" that the facility billed him for

After faxing every EOB from Kaiser to the billing agency, we started the long reimbursement process to recover over $2,000 in overpayments over the next year.

Launching MyFlexpa

This experience alone highlighted the crucial importance of having easy access to your health data and is why we decided to make MyFlexpa available to the general public. MyFlexpa also serves as our demonstration of what’s possible with Flexpa as a platform.

Visit my.flexpa.com to check it out for yourself. You'll need your health plan login credentials to access your information.

If you ever want to disconnect MyFlexpa or manage other connected applications, you can do so easily through Flexpa Connections.